Wednesday, 20 November 2013

Life in the Roman Army

Our topic theme this term is Invaders and Settlers - specifically the Ancient Romans and the Celts - and we have been having a lot of fun learning about the two civilizations.

This week we've been learning about life in the Roman army, making shields and swords and building our garrison town - which is a Math project as well. It ties in very nicely with our Math unit on symmetry and making 3-D shapes from nets and we can throw in a little metric measurement as well. :)

We start by drawing nets for cubes. We'd already cut and folded some nets but this was the first time for my girls to draw their own so we used grid paper and went through it step by step. There were a couple of mistakes but overall they did a pretty good job.

Next we folded and cut a giant square for the base of the camp and glued it onto our Celtic land.

We measured and marked the midpoints of the square to make sure that our "roads" would be exactly in the center. Then we folded the roads to find their midpoints - and glued them into place. You can see some little Roman buildings being placed into the town already. :)

The walls came next. More measuring and cutting and folding - a little help was needed here but I was really pleased with how cooperatively everyone was working. :)

Once the walls were in place everyone decided how to place their buildings so that the garrison town would be perfectly symmetrical.

And then it was time to make the legionnaires! We're still working on this - and we still have to make the legion banners - but our towns are starting to look pretty awesome! :)